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Advisor

Aktürk, M. Selim

Publisher

Bilkent University

Abstract

The aim of this study is to create flight schedules which are less susceptible
to unexpected flight delays. To this end, we examine the block time of the
flight in two parts, cruise time and non-cruise time. The cruise time is accepted
as controllable within some limit and it is taken as a decision variable in our
model. The non-cruise time is open to variations. In order to consider the
variability of non-cruise times in the planning stage, we propose a nonlinear mixed
integer two stage stochastic programming model which takes the non-cruise time
scenarios as input. The published departure times of flights are determined in
the first stage and the actual schedule is decided on the second stage depending
on the non-cruise times. The objective is to minimize the airline’s operating and
passenger dissatisfaction cost. Fuel and CO2 emission costs are nonlinear and
this nonlinearity is handled by second order conic inequalities. Two heuristics are
proposed to solve the problem when the size of networks and number of scenarios
increase. A computational study is conducted using the data of a major U.S.
carrier. We compare the solutions of our stochastic model with the ones found by
using expected values of non-cruise times and the company’s published schedule.